A few days ago, while snowshoeing on Passo Coe, the kind of mountain beauty that makes you believe that heaven exists, I stumbled upon the Tuono Base. The former NATO fortress is now just another silent museum, a pastime for tourists who like to take selfies with steel that could once have burned half a continent. You can see the Hercules missiles in the picture. Today they are just empty shells, but once, with a range of 140 km and nuclear warheads, they were ready to welcome Soviet bombers.
Life in these bases was the height of human paranoia. 24/7 shifts, false alarms like breakfast and drills that forced you to react before you even realized you were awake. It was the same in the JNA, after all. A real alarm here meant that someone had finally pressed that famous red button and that the Apocalypse had begun. Life in the base was based on pure distrust, Italians and Americans patted each other on the back and stood guard together, but everyone knew only their small part of the job. No one was allowed to have the whole picture for fear of mistake or betrayal.
When the Cold War ended, those bases ended up in museum archives. We neatly folded the apocalypse into a drawer, like old laundry that we no longer need. Humanity threw itself into technological hedonism, convinced that the history of world conflicts was over. Missile sensors have become toys in our phones, gyroscopes and accelerometers rotate your screen and count your daily steps, military navigation helps us find the nearest pizzeria, and artificial intelligence is slowly taking over what little brain we have left. Medicine is keeping us alive longer than ever, plane tickets are cheaper than taxis, and we have come to understand peace as a right, not as a damned fortune.
Today, that illusion is breaking like cheap glass. The international order, that fine consensus on peace, is being trampled under the boots of economic and military power. The voice of small nations is heard in that din, about like a whisper in a tractor factory. Let it be recorded here, although it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic, that we used to produce tractors. Once upon a time, Americans and Italians trembled together at this base before the Russians. Today, Europe is rightly wondering whether it should fear America itself, its new isolationism and the threat of landing on European soil.
The Canadian prime minister summed it up brutally at Davos, “The big powers can do it alone. They have the markets, the military and the power to dictate the rules. The medium and small ones don’t have that. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.”
Short, clear and quite disgusting. If a Canada, with all its maple syrup, peace and our world escaping war, fears becoming just a small side dish on the geopolitical menu, what are we to expect?
Perhaps what saves us is that we are such a nuisance in our own right that no normal person will want to “order” us. Who, realistically, would chew such a bitter morsel of our everyday, meaningless nonsense?
As Russia reopens its Arctic bases and diplomacy begins to resemble a street fight, I watch these Hercules missiles in the snow. They look like well-off pensioners in a park, but that bad feeling in my stomach, the one that doesn't go away with brandy, and in my case, antibiotics, is insidiously warning me. And despite the fact that now, while your robot vacuum cleaner does its job, you can stare at fake videos of residents of high-rise buildings in Kamchatka sledding directly from their tenth-floor balconies, maybe we're too early to dust off history. Maybe these steel phalluses are just waiting for new soldiers and new shifts in paranoia and fear of the last bell.
Or maybe, standing so close to this abandoned base, I've just picked up the germ of old paranoia from the air. I sincerely hope so. Because I'd hate to be right.
Bonus video:
